


Rooftop Romance

by Crowsister



Series: Hear Me Roar (and you'll know your name sounds better when it's whispered low) [4]
Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén, Fallen Hero: Rebirth (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Love Letter to the Femme Fatale Archetype, Retribution Spoilers, comic book allusions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-23 20:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20220841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowsister/pseuds/Crowsister
Summary: You enjoy toying with Herald while you're Macavity. Being yourself really is the secret to getting along, isn't it?





	Rooftop Romance

**Author's Note:**

> This originally was gonna be a one-shot, but then I decided that it'd be more fun to space this out into a 3 chapter fun time.

You did not log this knowledge — Herald’s usual patrol routes — for this purpose. That thought hits you strongly as you perch along a rooftop, using an air conditioning unit as cover as you wait for him.

Chen and Ortega had been easy apologies. A solid donation of ten thousand dollars each to two reputable charities (two that the two of them advocated for themselves): one for retired vets and the other for children at risk. Both donations were sent anonymously, both with messages apologizing to their superhero personas and promises to do better. You had to be careful: they could _ know _ it was Macavity, but as long as they couldn’t prove it the messages were fine. Knowing and proving are two very different things. The Farm taught you that.

But Herald. What charity do you donate to when the man advocated for nearly every reputable charity in the city? This is almost as aggravating a question as the classic “What do you get the man who has everything?” The fact that he seems to primarily champion the same charities you had while you’d been Sidestep was just...somewhere between endearing and frustrating.

So you wait, watching the skies for a spot of uranian blue against the dark sky. You jump, hearing a scream from somewhere close. _ Too _ close. You prowl on all fours to the edge of the rooftop and look down into the alleyway. You see a man shoving a woman against a wall and you see red, dropping down into the alleyway silently.

You stand fifteen feet away from them, extending your claws with a flick of your wrists. “I always love it,” you drawl and the man’s attention snaps to the sound of your voice, purring distorted by the vocalizers in your helmet, “when a man’s big and strong-” You take a slow step closer, tilting your head and watching as the two of them watch you in a mixture of fear and confusion. “-and he shows it by picking on a woman half his size.”

The man’s obviously drunk, it’s the only explanation for the thought patterns rolling off of him in waves. The idea of beating you where the Rangers failed. Proving the LDPD could handle things. Oh, a frustrated detective of the LDPD, taking out aggression on a civilian. He steps away from the woman (she’s frozen against the wall, terrified and awed) and he points his knife in your direction.

As he moves forward, you purr, “Be gentle, it’s my first time.” When he gets within range of where you stand, you snap and claw the knife out of his hand. Your whip extends from your right palm and you cleanly coil it around his legs. Trip him. You put a foot on his chest and look down, knowing the purple lenses of your helmet (your “eyes”) stare down impassively at him as he struggles beneath you, grabs hold of your cape and thinks it’s an advantage until you cleanly swipe his gripe loose.

You look over to the woman. And you make a choice to be _ different _ from your muse, your role model, the fictional character who’d given you hope for yourself. You know that she would walk up and snarl at the woman for being _ weak _, for not clawing the man herself. But while she was fictional, she was human. You aren’t. You can be better. You ask the woman, “Are you alright?”

She nods, awe overpowering her fear momentarily (she’s never had anyone stand up for her like this before).

“Would you like a shadow to escort you home?” you ask.

Shock overwhelms her like a wildfire and she tears up. She nods again.

You knock the off-duty detective out with a snarl and a thought, then tie him up with one of your disposable bolas. You leave a strong desire in him for him to confess what he did to his peers and superiors, to look for redemption for this (to find help for his addiction), and leave him tied to a streetlight. 

The woman watches you with big green eyes as you walk closer. She reaches inside her purse and holds out her wallet to you (cute, black faux leather with a cat design). “H-here. To pay for you saving-”

“No need,” you answer, retracting your claws and gently touching her hand to push the wallet back to her.

She’s confused. “You...you’re a supervillain though.”

“I’m a supervillain with class,” you answer, letting a chuckle spill out of you. “Don’t worry about it.” You snap your fingers. “I’ve been rude.” You give a curtsy. “Macavity.”

“Um...” She’s torn. She bites her lip before giving you a curtsy. “Holly.”

“I love your jacket, Holly,” you reply, smiling under your helmet. “So. You continue on your way home. I’ll be right above you the whole time.”

The two of you traverse the city. She sometimes stops and looks for you and you give her a finger-wiggling wave that makes her relax. Holly goes up the stairs into her apartment building, but before she enters, she looks for you one last time. You’re sitting on the roof of the apartment building, perched in the cat-like posture you favor.

“Thank you!” she calls up to you.

You give a little wave and she goes inside. You wait a minute or two, tracing her thought patterns to make sure she has no unpleasant surprises waiting for her. When you feel her relief when she locks her door, you pull away and stand up.

“Well,” a voice behind you says, “that was nice of you.”

You turn and there’s Herald. You kick yourself for not noticing his thoughts (though, you note with some pride, he’s definitely getting better at stealth with his flying. You’re not sure if you’re proud of him for playing dirty there or for getting better overall).

You give a small shrug. “Don’t like that sort of thing in my city.”

“Sure, but you didn’t have to walk her all the way home,” he replies. “Could’ve just beat the guy up and then left her there.” He lands, eying you thoughtfully. “You didn’t have to make her feel safe.”

Stretching with a mock laziness, you shrug. “I’ve been her.” Perfect answer: suitably cryptic enough to be true and not give him much to work with. You roll your shoulders back, tilting your head. “I’m surprised.”

“About what?”

“That you haven’t tried to arrest me yet.”

He blinks, remembering who _ you _ are and who _ he _is. You spring away with this moment, running across the rooftops. You don’t hear him move, but you can sense him behind you. You stay off the grapnel system for this, relying on jump-jets to supplement your jumps from rooftop to rooftop. You’re surprised to find yourself smiling under your mask as you clamber up an office building. You realize where you both are and an idea hits you with gusto. You grin wider. You always did think better with adrenaline and a mask.

You land on a rooftop and turn to face him. “So, I hear you like to talk to villains.”

“Where did you hear that?” he asks, landing and falling into the stance you taught him.

“Little news article about _ this _parrrrticular restaurant,” you drawl, slowly waving a hand at the roof you were both on.

Herald’s thought process is always so endearing, as he pieces things together that you throw out as Kyra. It is somehow more addicting having it when you’re Macavity, maybe because he doesn’t know how to read your energy as Macavity. Kyra makes a little more sense to him, with how “haunted” he thought you were (and you technically are haunted, but not in a way that he’d fully understand). Macavity lacks all of that, unadulteratedly confident and relaxed. It’s like watching a dog try to get through a door with a stick that was too large for him. You realize with a small shiver down your spine that you’re rooting for the stupid golden retriever to get the stick inside, for him to _ understand. _

“I assume you want to talk, then.” Herald stays guarded still (good, you think, proud), but drops out of fighting stance. “Then talk.”

You know he doesn’t wear recording equipment (Chen does, Julia never, but Herald only did for PR flights through town. Something about not needing to worry about cameras falling off if he made too fast of a move), so you give him knowledge that he can’t necessarily prove (because you’re the bad guy, why trust your word 100%?). “You’re a hard man to apologize to.”

That throws him off and he struggles to keep composure under his cute goggles. “I...what?”

“I’ve been...apologizing,” you admit, drawling it like the process is a chore. “To the Rangers. The government takes care of you all, so it isn’t like I can foot medical bills or anything to help with day to day. You’re all do-gooders, so quietly transferring money into your personal lives would be more insult than apology. So, why not put my money to good use in a way that you all would appreciate? Charity.”

“Hard to see it as charity, with the way you get money.”

You snicker. “What, stealing from the fat cats to give to the starving? You know that I don’t steal from anyone who can’t _ recover _ from the theft in the first place.” His mind stutters for a response to that and you smirk under your helmet.

“It’s still- Macavity, you _ know _ it’s illegal,” Herald answers, hanging onto pure and simple ideology because it’s his armor.

You answer neatly in Latin that you know he doesn’t understand (he’ll look it up later, because that’s the sort of nerd he is), “Lex malla, lex nulla.”

He runs a hand through his stupid soft hair and goes to reply, but you cut him off, “You don’t have to answer this now, but when a person is benefitting from toxic laws and stifling the masses, is it truly immoral to steal from that person?” you ask and his mind greedily absorbs the question into the puzzle he’s building for Macavity. “But that’s simply how the world is at the moment and thus, I steal from those that abuse the system.”

“Okay, then why apologize to the Rangers at all? We’re apart of that system,” he asks and you grin under your helmet, internally purring over his attempts to piece you — the real you, not masked Kyra, but Macavity — together.

You make a show of tilting your head, putting a hand up to your chin. “Because I had bad manners when I made my first debut.”

“You...what?”

“I went too hard,” you answer truthfully. “I was too eager to be myself for everyone to see, so I picked the most public way to do it. I wanted too badly to show everyone who hurt me that I was strong. But I took that out on you and the Rangers when you all are not my actual enemy. Certainly, a tool used _ by _ my enemy, but you’re all used unknowingly.” You twirl a hand in the air. “Crucial information kept behind security lockdowns, things to make sure the heroes are kept in the dark. Can’t have them knowing things that would make them choose other things. Your ethics couldn’t take knowing the truth and still continuing down the same path with the same invisible leash. It’s not your fault for the things you all don’t know. Hence, apology.”

You pause, giving him time to chew on that. His mind leaps to you, Kyra, and about how Julia said your death was faked by shadowy enemies that she couldn’t talk about without endangering _ Rangers. _ The people who _ volunteered _ to be shot at. It makes you blush with how easily his mind leaps to you.

“So,” you reply, smirking as his attention snaps right back to you, “does this little restaurant have a donation box?”

“What?”

“I puzzled for the longest time,” you drawl, your voice tinting more playful than bored as you slink about the rooftop, “about what charity to give to for you. Steel and Charge?” You snap your fingers, twice. “Simple. Easy.” He watches you, your cape making him remember how you tricked him during your fight at the museum. Puts him back on edge. “Lady Argent doesn’t get an apology, because her manners were arguably _ worse _ than mine-”

* * *

_“You’re supposed to be a hero,” you cough, looking up at her as she has her hand wrapped around your neck. You’re pulling a distraction card that used to cause you — Sidestep you, not Macavity you — to hesitate. You need time._

_ Lady Argent looks down at you, with a smile that springs like a bear trap. “No cameras, no audience,” she damn near purrs and your blood goes cold. Her grip gets a little tighter. “I don’t have to fit anyone’s idea for _ ** _hero_ ** _ .” _

_ You and the Rat King realize at the same time with a start that she’s going to kill you if you don’t go _ ** _faster_ ** _ . _

* * *

“-but you? You get an apology, Herald,” you reply. “But you’re so hard. You advocate for almost every reputable charity in the city. I was rather touched by your speech for the Los Diablos League of Animal Shelters. It’s very clear to everyone with critical thinking skills that you don’t play favorites in charities. So, I’ve had to go unorthodox. I’ve had to tip my hand a little to find something you care about. And by your reaction, you care about this-” you gesture at the rooftop “-establishment. More than the usual caring, that is.”

Herald is still trying to figure you out, which makes you feel so amused. He’s trying to figure out if you’re actually threatening the restaurant. You shift your body language from ready for a fight to bored, letting your mind dig for things around the area with the Rat King helping you look. They find the memory of the owner setting up a donation website, getting the URL with ease. You internally purr and smile.

“You seriously just-” Herald gestures at you, confusion written into every thought and every movement in his face. “-want to apologize?”

“Mmmhmm,” you hum, affecting the image of a bored cat. “Though, I guess if you’re going to be difficult, I’ll just leave you one thing.” You turn at the right speed for your cape to draw his attention to the right places and jog to the edge of the rooftop. 

Herald’s mind starts behind you as you jump, jump jets getting you to the neighboring rooftop. “Wait-”

“I hope you like the view,” you call over your shoulder, laughing. “It’s the only thing you’re catching tonight.”


End file.
